This morning our ship docked in Giurgiu the final port on
our cruise. OMG, what a run down dreadful place it was too. Stray dogs, graffiti, rubbish and many abandoned buildings with broken windows. Our guide told us that the businesses had begun at the end of the communist era but did not do well and eventually people just walked away from them.
We disembarked for the final
time and boarded buses to Bucharest which took about 1 ½ hours and travelled
through the Romanian countryside.
We
arrived in Bucharest and they took us to the
Village Museum, a village with authentic dwellings from all regions of the
country including rural cottages, farmhouses and water mills. It was very interesting but we had not nearly
enough time there. Then they whisked us
off to a restaurant for lunch and some traditional dancing and music. The lunch was quite nice.
We then went to visit Ceausecu’s lavish and expansive House
of the People. It is huge and mostly
unoccupied. When we arrived there we had
to hand over our passports which we weren’t very happy about. The building has lifts but for some strange
reason tourists are not allowed to use the lifts. We had a young male guide and he was very
good. He took us to many rooms with
grand chandeliers and lots of marble.
The rooms were grand in size but mostly very modestly furnished. We went
out onto the balcony which looks out over the entire city and along the main
street.
Michael Jackson stood on this balcony and looked down at the
thousands of fans and told his audience how happy he was to be in Budapest –
oops – he meant to say Bucharest. Nobody
cared they were just so thrilled to have a live concert.
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